Naomi Jackson - The Star Side of Bird Hill

“Well, then,” Hyacinth said, rooting around in her mind for something meaningful to say.

“The Lord works in mysterious ways, don’t you think?”

Hyacinth just nodded and then said finally, “Yes. Yes, he does.”

Hyacinth turned to leave, but was pulled back by a question. “When was the last time you saw Errol?” Ms. Zelma asked.

“Maybe a month ago, when he came to pick up the kids for Kiddie Kadooment. I ain’t lay my eyes on him since then, lucky for him.” Hyacinth knew there was more her friend wanted to ask.

“Well, everything comes to its own righteous end,” Ms. Zelma said.

Hyacinth grunted her assent. And then she said good night. On Ms. Zelma’s steps, the moon where it shone above Hyacinth was brilliant. She stopped to consider the way her life was so thoroughly changed by the last few months, and marveled that although she’d watched as the moon waxed and waned, it was still the same. After her grandmother died, Hyacinth had gone on a kind of strike against God. A fragile truce was heralded by her baptism and broken again by her husband’s, and then Avril’s, death. Something seemed righted by Errol’s passing. She could feel the weight of her child’s absence differently now, feel it settling on her in a way she could bear.

“I KNOW what happened, you know,” Trevor said.

Dionne looked up from the bowl of rice on her lap. She was so intent on separating the pebbles from the grains that she didn’t notice Trevor walk up or hear him mount the steps to Hyacinth’s house. She’d found solace in being Hyacinth’s shadow in the kitchen, staying so close and quiet that her grandmother never moved too quickly lest she run over Dionne at her elbow or underfoot. Dionne didn’t say anything to encourage Trevor, but he stood there, his gaze intent on a green lizard that was racing across the gallery, a safer place to rest his eyes than on Dionne, where they’d been just moments before.

“I said, I know what happened,” Trevor tried again.

“Well, if you know that, then you also know that I’m not deaf,” Dionne said, still looking down and sifting her hands through the rice.

“Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“For the love of God, Trevor, stop talking in circles, man.”

“They say Jean’s healing nicely.”

“Oh,” Dionne said, surprised that Trevor, whom she’d heard dismiss Jean as a nasty so-and-so in front of his friends, didn’t take the chance to rail on about how Jean got exactly what he deserved.

“He’s better now. Maybe we could go see him one day.”

Dionne didn’t say anything, hoping that Trevor, who was practically allergic to silence, would eventually become uncomfortable and go away.

“Your friend Saranne’s gone back to Trinidad.”

“I know,” Dionne said.

“T&T.” Trevor moved closer, to the top step where Dionne sat. He stretched his long arms up to the gallery’s awning. From where Dionne sat, she could see his stomach. If she wanted to, she could have leaned in to sniff the scent of the English laundry soap Mrs. Loving used, and she had once loved to smell on Trevor’s clothes.

“I know that T&T stands for Trinidad and Tobago.”

“You think you’ll miss her?” Trevor invited himself to sit next to Dionne on the front step. She didn’t move over; his legs dangled over the side of the steps.

“Not really.”

“You guys spent so much time together.”

“You could spend a lot of time with someone and still not really know them.”

“That’s true,” Trevor said, and then stood. He noticed Dionne squinting up at him and he stepped to his right to block the sun for her.

“All those years with my mother, and I never saw what she did coming. Sometimes people have bombs ticking inside them, but you can’t hear them until they go off.”

Trevor nodded, and for the first time in a long time, Dionne didn’t dismiss him or think him stupid, but was actually grateful for his visit. It was a relief to have someone to talk to who wasn’t inscribed in the same circle of grief she shared with her sister and grandmother.

“I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry about?” Dionne craned her neck to get a closer look at Trevor. She could see that he was taller since she saw him last.

“I’m sorry about what happened to your mother.”

“It’s OK.”

“Not really.”

“You’re right,” Dionne said, and for the first time she felt something soft land where her rage had been before.

“I mean, you don’t have to pretend it’s OK, at least not with me,” Trevor said.

Dionne nodded.

“Well, anyways, I was just passing by. Maybe I’ll come check you tomorrow.”

“I’d like that,” she said.

“Look, I know you didn’t plan to stay here after the summer was over. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I’m glad you’re here.” Trevor took the three steps down from Hyacinth’s house in one leap. “All right, then,” he said.

“All right,” Dionne said, and then returned to the rice in her lap. Contemplating the whys and wherefores of her new life was easier when her hands had work to do.

BY THE TIME ADVENT ARRIVED, the long hair that Dionne had when she arrived in Barbados was falling in thick clumps, which she left behind her everywhere, like bread crumbs on a trail back to herself. At the desk where she studied and where her mother had studied before her, she scratched a bloody patchwork into her scalp and plucked out her straightened hair strand by strand. On the back steps where she shelled peas and cleaned rice, on the gallery near the chair where she always sat, Dionne’s hair dusted the ground like the snow she knew was starting to fall in New York. It was a nervous condition even Hyacinth didn’t have a cure for, because she couldn’t follow Dionne to school and around the house, couldn’t force her to stop this new habit of picking at and pulling out her hair. Hyacinth figured that in time, as Dionne settled in to her new life on Bird Hill, this, too, would pass.

Every first snow, Avril let Dionne and Phaedra stay home from school. It was a welcome respite from her ironclad rule that only children on their deathbeds could miss a chance to learn. As soon as the warmth burned off the air, right after Halloween burst through their neighborhood with rotten eggs hurled against bus windows, the girls would start to study the weather forecast, hoping that they could will a snow day to come simply by watching for it. That day usually came in November, but sometimes not until the first or second week in December. On the appointed day, they roasted marshmallows on the stovetop, drank hot chocolate and ate pancakes, and snuggled up on the couch together, telling stories as the city’s white coat fell around her shoulders. Avril would tell them about what it was like when she was in Girl Guides, and the girls would pretend that they’d never heard these tales before, not the one about the time when she didn’t have a bowel movement for a whole week during sleepaway camp because she had a “shy bottom,” or when she gave a girl a black eye for calling her a buller man’s wife, the nickname Avril earned once it was clear she would not succumb to pressure to scorn her gay friend, Jean. Without fail, Avril would tell them about the first time she’d seen snow in New York, how she hid under the covers in a cold-water flat in Bed-Stuy, terrified as she counted the hours until Errol came home from work.

Dionne wondered what had happened to their winter clothes, the jackets and coats and boots they’d packed away in plastic bins before coming to Barbados. Hyacinth said that a distant aunt, one who the girls never heard of, had gone to clean out their apartment and give their things to a church. Occasionally, Dionne wondered who had ended up with her things. She was particularly curious about a cream peacoat with brown leather buttons that her father bought her the year she turned eleven, right before he left. Her last winter in Brooklyn, her arms were already too long for the coat, but she wore it anyway, fashioning a pair of stockings into arm warmers; she was glad that her mother was too dazed then to protest. Every evening now, when she watched the news broadcasts from the States and saw clips of people rushing around Rockefeller Center doing their holiday shopping, Dionne scrutinized the screen, looking for a girl wearing her coat.